Prior to May of 2011, if someone asked me who I was, I would have a responded that I was a lawyer, identifying myself by my line of work. Sometimes it takes a life event to re-evaluate how you label yourself and to acknowledge publicly what really matters in life.
It was during that month of May that I returned home from an overseas church trip to find my son, Anthony, weakening by the day with a persistent fever. My son was just two and a half years old then. Within a few days, we found ourselves at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where my son was diagnosed with leukemia (ALL). He was admitted to the hospital for over a week and at that point was very sick. My wife, Antoinette, and I would rotate nights at the hospital so one of us could also be at home with our daughter, Laura, who was seven years old at the time.
Spending so much time at the hospital was an eye-opener for me. You quickly learned which children had good prognoses and which ones did not. Even in that setting with my own very sick son, I had a sense of how fortunate we were not to have a worse diagnosis/prognosis for my son. Over the last two years, my son has had more chemotherapy treatments that I can count and has been stuck and prodded more times than I would ever want to remember. Like so many other cancer kids, he had lost his hair for a period of time as well.… Continue Reading